Who Is Jared?

My name is Jared Way. I was born in California, and became an "adoptive" Minnesotan. Now I'm contentedly expatriated in South Korea.

For many years I was a database programmer, with a background in Linguistics and Spanish Literature.

I quit my well-paying job and starting in September, 2007, I spent 2 years teaching EFL to elementary kids in Ilsan (suburban Seoul), South Korea. From April, 2010, until April, 2011, I worked a public school position in rural southwestern Korea (Yeonggwang County). I have since returned to Ilsan and continue to work there.

As of June, 2013, I remain in Ilsan in South Korea, but I was diagnosed with cancer, and have been undergoing treatment. As a consequence, the focus and tone of this blog has changed somewhat.

I started this blog before I even had the idea of coming to Korea (first entry: Caveat: And lo...). So this is not meant to be a blog about Korea, by any stretch of the imagination. But life in Korea, and Korean language and culture, inevitably play a central role in this blog's current incarnation. Let's just say... it's a blog about whatever I happen to be thinking, that currently takes place in Korea.

Basically, this blog is a newsletter for the voices in my head. It keeps everyone on the same page: it has become a sort of aide-mémoire.

If you're curious about me, there is a great deal of me here. I believe in what I call "opaque transparency" - you can learn almost everything about me if you want, but it's not immediately easy to find.

A distillation of my personal philosophy (at least on good days):
I have made the realization that happiness is not a mental state. It is not something that is given to you, or that you find, or that you can lose, or that can be taken from you. Happiness is something that you do. And like most things that you do, it is volitional. You can choose to do happiness, or not. You have complete freedom with respect to the matter.

Geofiction - this has evolved into a significant "hobby" for me. I like to draw imaginary maps, and there is a website that has enabled this vice.

I worked as a volunteer administrator for the site OpenGeofiction on and off for a few years. I created (but no longer maintain) the site's main wiki page: OGF Wiki. I am not currently working as administrator but I remain active on the site.

The above work has required my becoming an expert in the Openstreetmap system. Openstreetmap is an attempt do for online maps what wikipedia has done for encyclopedias. I have considered becoming an openstreetmap contributor, but I feel that my current location in Korea hinders that, since I don't have a good grasp Korean cartographic naming conventions.

2018.03.20

So these guys made a pop song in Italian complaining about people's failure to use the subjunctive properly. On the one hand, this is grammar peevery, and thus a linguist (such as I pretend to be on occasion) can't really be expected to approve. Grammar peevery is in fact diametrically opposed to rational, descriptive linguistics. Nevertheless, peevery can be entertaining, and it's funny to see Italians singing about grammar.

There is a long history of me creating new "blogs" for one specific purpose or another. The longest-lived of my alternate blogs was the one I maintained for my job and students for several years. That blog still exists but it's largely dormant.

The reason for this new blog is that, although I don't mind sharing my geofiction activities here on this blog, I'm not sure how open I want to be about the rest of my life with fellow members of the geofiction community where I participate. That is, do they want to see or do they care to see my poetry, my ruminations of day-to-day classroom life, my oddball videos and proverb decipherments?

Since I think it's better to keep those things separate, I decided to make a separate blog. I also did it just to support the "technical unity" (if you will) of the website I've been constructing.

I may develop a habit of allowing the things I post on that other blog to appear here, but not vice versa. This blog would be the comprehensive "all Jared" blog, while that would be a kind of filtered version for the geofiction community.

Anyway, here's the blog (blog.geofictician.net), which currently has 4 posts, created over the weekend. Note that it seems like this blog will be fairly technical, representing the most abstruse aspects of my bizarre and embarrassing hobby, which might be termed "computational geofiction."

Soyeon spoke to me today, after class ended. It had been one of the "CC" classes where I make the advanced middle-schoolers "teach" the class after preparing the materials, and I'd complimented her on having done a good job. She had. She's a natural teacher, maybe. And her spoken English, despite her twisted morass of underlying grammar problems, comes off as well-accented and mostly quite idiomatic.

She announced, somewhat proudly, "A boy asked me out yesterday."

Soyeon's in the seventh grade. I don't quite know what the typical "growing up" trajectory of a Korean teenager is like, but Soyeon far from typical. She is the most "American" Korean child I have ever known. I don't know how she got that way - she's never lived abroad and in fact has never visited an English-speaking country as far as I know. The closest she's gotten, I think, have been a few short trips to Thailand and Malaysia. I only mention that by way of saying that for all I know she's not particularly typical among her peers, but rather seems to be following a more Western route through adolescence, in which dating in middle school, if not universal, is certainly not viewed as unprecedented. I expect the more traditional Korean household would have none of this. But this is a society in rapid cultural transition, as usual, and individual families occupy quite distinct subcultures despite the broader homogeneity. Some families are utterly westernized, while others hove to a more traditionalist, even Confucian line.

Anyway, that's just background. I felt flattered that she offered this piece of news to me. It's demonstrative of a kind of trust. I've been her teacher for 4 years now, so I guess it's somewhat to be expected.

I said to her, "That's great. Do you like him?"

She nodded, and added, "He liked me."

"Liked you? Why do you say it in past tense? What happened?"

I was, pragmatically, wondering if this was grammatical mistake. Hence my question. But I was quite wrong. She demonstrated this, after a disproportionate delay in answering.

She looked at me slyly, and said, "Nothing happened. He liked me...." Another too-long pause. "Now he loves me." And an emphatic shrug, for punctuation.

Ah. It was a joke.

"Well that's fast," I said, as neutrally as possible.

"Uh huh," she said, with a near native-English-speaking teenage tonality. And walked away, playing some game on her smartphone.

2018.03.16

Ōoka Tadasuke (1677–1752) was a Japanese samurai and bureaucrat during the shogunate of Tokugawa Yoshimune. He served as a magistrate of Edo (Tokyo), and his roles included chief of police, judge and jury. He has evolved into a kind of folk hero, as an archetypically fair and honest judge. There is a famous story called "The Case of the Stolen Smell." Ōoka heard the case of a paranoid innkeeper who accused a poor student of literally stealing the fumes of his cooking by eating when the innkeeper was cooking to flavor his dull food. Although his colleagues advised Ōoka to throw the case out as ridiculous, he decided to hear the case. The judge resolved the matter by ordering the student to pass the money he had in one hand to his other and ruling that the price of the smell of food is the sound of money. (Above adapted from the wikipedia).

2018.03.15

My friend Bob asked me if I could help him make sense of the lyrics to this 18th century Mexican musical composition. Unfortunately I don't think I was much use. Anyway it was interesting to try, and interesting to see what was going on culturally in Mexico City in the 1700's.